How are emerging technologies changing the field of Knowledge Management?

I recently read three articles that, though dealing with separate issues of knowledge management, all centered around the impact of emerging technologies on the way we manage knowledge.  The three articles were:

• Chua, A. Y. K., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social media: The case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 17(2), 237-249. doi:10.1108/13673271311315196
• Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74. doi:10.1108/13673270910971833
• Levy, M. (2009). Web 2.0 implications on knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(1), 120-134. doi:10.1108/13673270910931215

Let me start with the Moria Levy article.  Levy wrote this paper in 2009, and though 5 years can be a lifetime in the world of technology, she shows great foresight in her appraisal of Web 2.0, and its implications in the world of KM.  At the time of her research, the KM community was starting to ask, “Can KM benefit from Web 2.0?”  I could almost see her rolling her eyes at this question.  Of course it could benefit from Web 2.0!  Levy quotes researcher Singel’s description of the change in online climate, “Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people” (2005).  

There is some debate of whether Web 2.0 was a revolution or an evolution.  For the discussion of KM adapting to the changes, I’m not really sure it matters.  The fact is that now we have a world connected online and who are more than ever becoming active participants instead of solely consumers.  It was Levy’s opinion that KM should embrace the changes, and on many levels, the field as a whole has taken that advice to heart.

 

Next, the article by Chua and Banerjee, published in 2013, uses Starbucks as a case study of how customer knowledge management (CKM) can be accomplished through the use of social media.  According to their study, Starbucks has been a innovative leader in the area of CKM.  They have taken many steps to help, “redefine the roles of its customers through the use of social media by transforming them from passive recipients of beverages to active contributors of innovation” (237).  

CKM doesn’t just manage knowledge from customers, it also manages knowledge for customers, and about them.  Starbucks has accomplished this by embracing many different types of social media.  They use microblogging services (ex. Twitter), social networking sites (ex. Facebook), location-aware mobile services (ex. Foursquare), and corporate discussion forum services (ex. IdeaStorm).  Chua and Banerjee evaluated data from all four categories of social media, and found that Starbucks was highly successful in using a customer-centric approach to KM.  This approach has not only proven successful in management knowledge, but in engaging customers, maximizing its marketing and branding, and protecting its online reputation.

Lastly, Tay Pei Lyn Grace published a review of wikis as a knowledge management tool.  It should be noted that this review was written in 2009, when it was still uncertain if wikis would be a passing phase, or a valuable tool in the filed of KM.   In her review, Grace evaluates the different types of wikis, including personal, semantic, corporate, structured, and peer-to-peer.  She also looks at three different case studies: Mapa, eBay, and Ingenta.  I found the case of eBay to be especially interesting.  eBay had reached a point when the posts on its community boards were becoming difficult to manage. They needed a way to index all of the message so they would be accessible.  They chose to use JotSpot’s system, and restricted the use of the wiki to registered users only.  At the time of this published review, the wiki was still in its beta version, but was very successful.  I know from personal experience that the wiki is easy to navigate and appears to be well managed as to contain the most up-to-date and trustworthy information.

 

These three articles all show the growing role of emerging technologies in the field of KM.  If the field didn’t collectively get the memo in 2009 when Levy wrote her article, I’m sure they’ve all gotten it by now!  

 

When LIS theory meets the real world…

About a week ago, my husband and I happened to be watching the six o’clock news when a story came on about a storage facility finding a unique collection of items.  A couple had purchased the business a few years before, and had recently been cleaning out a storage unit that belonged to the business.  In it they found a collection of WWII era military medals, including a Purple Heart, that probably had been accidentally left behind by a past customer.  They discovered the medals all belonged to a man named Anthony Grunder, but they had been unable to locate him, or his family in order to return the medals.  Never one to pass up a challenge, I immediately went to work finding information.  I knew it was going to be a bit tougher considering the fact that I don’t subscribe to services like ancestry.com, but that was okay.  Sometimes the tougher, the better!

First I performed a basic Google search.  Before long I came across information that showed Anthony Grunder passed away in 1991, and was buried in a military cemetery locally, Zachery Taylor Cemetery.  Unfortunately obituaries weren’t available online that far back, so I had to continue to search.  Eventually I came across another obituary for a woman with the same last name who passed away in 2008 in Louisville.  She was close to the same age as Anthony, and was also buried in Zachary Taylor Cemetery.  Since you can only be buried in that cemetery if you’re in the military or have a spouse in the military, I knew the odds were pretty good that she was his wife.  I read through the obituary, and even though the husband’s name wasn’t listed, I noticed that she had a son named Anthony.  From that point I felt I had enough information to push forward to locate one of the children.

I chose to search for their only daughter, since she had an unusual hyphenated name that would be easy to track.  I got lucky enough to find her right away on Facebook, but knew if I sent her a message it would get sent to the spam folder instead of her inbox (since we aren’t FB friends).  Fortunately she had fairly lax FB privacy settings, so I was able to see that she owned a dog rescue organization in Indiana.  I liked her already!

Her dog rescue organization also had a Facebook page, and that page offered a phone number. So within an hour of when I first saw the news story, I was dialing the number of a total stranger.  A woman picked up and I began to tell her the story of how I had come to call her.  She confirmed Anthony Grunder was her father and she was SO excited to hear about the medals!  Since her brother still lived in the area, she told me she would call him and that he could contact the storage facility.

At the end of the call, she asked my name, and I decided to just give her my first name. The truth of the matter is that any librarian could have taken the same series of steps (or maybe fewer if they had a paid service like Ancestry.com).  Plus, the idea of being interviewed on the local news is not my cup of tea!

The next night, the news followed up with the son, who was able to be reunited with his father’s collection of WWII medals.  The story didn’t mention his sister calling him with the information, but that was okay.  It was satisfying enough to be able to use the skills I’ve acquired to help someone in such a meaningful way.  Librarians, though we may appear to be an unobtrusive bunch, often have the opportunity to be superheroes!

Even though the daughter didn’t know my name, she did have my phone number on her caller I.D.  She was nice enough to text message me the next day to thank me for my help.  It wasn’t necessary, but it was a nice ending to an already happy story!

Here’s the original story:

Click here!

How is Web 2.0 changing knowledge management?

Now for the first time in history, we are able to arrange our concepts without the silent limitations of the physical.  How might out ideas, organizations, and knowledge itself change?  

~David Weinberger, Harvard University

Knowledge management has been considered a recognized discipline since the early 1990’s.  Recently with the emergence of Web 2.0, the field of knowledge management has been evolving toward a model based upon user participation over a commerce-based system.

I recently read an interesting article by Moria Levy entitled, WEB 2.0 implications on knowledge management.  In it she reviews the history of Web 2.0, the idea of Enterprise 2.0 (the term given to explain the use of social software platforms within companies and their customers), and how KM can be improved upon in the light of Web 2.0.

I think the thing that stood out to me the most in her article was the opinion that KM can only be implemented using Web 2.0 methods if users choose to participate.  There are SO many ways to organize ideas and manage knowledge online now. Are we as a society embracing these tools, or are we becoming overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices?  One possible saving grace is that Levy sees the younger generations embracing these methods more than older generations.  She quotes scholar Carswell (2007), who says the younger generation will embrace these changes in part because:

1) They’ll expect it to be available.

and

2) They’ll find it natural to use it.

This makes complete sense to me.  Anyone who has handed an iPad to a three year old (or even younger!) knows that technology now comes naturally to young people these days.  It’s ingrained.  They know nothing but technology, and they’ve been able to learn naturally alongside the evolution.

I’m still not 100% confident that we won’t become overwhelmed as a society with the avalanche of tools available online, but reading about the younger generations gives me hope.  If we can become savvy as a body of users, we’ll be able sift through the choices and the cream will rise to the top!

As a side note…the quote at the top of this blog is by David Weinberger of Harvard University.  I don’t know much about him outside of that he is an author and has several blogs (that seem pretty good from my quick scanning!).  The quote is from his book,  Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.  Has anyone read this book?  It appears to be more of a business book than specifically about KM, but I’m still intrigued!

References:

Levy, M. (2009). Web 2.0 implications on knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(1), 120-134. doi:10.1108/13673270910931215

Tacit knowledge- What is it?

This semester in my LIS program (which is my last semester, by the way!), I’m taking Knowledge Management with Dr. Sean Burns.  To be honest, I chose this class, in part, because it fulfills a requirement for a certificate in Risk Management that I’m working toward.  One of the required texts for the class is The Tacit Dimension, by Michael Polanyi.  I didn’t exactly know what the term “tacit knowledge” meant at the time I signed up for the class, and I’m still trying to fully grasp it!

You see, in a nutshell, tacit knowledge is the knowledge we have without knowing we have it.  Hmmm.  Trying to understand this concept reminded me of this:

http://screen.yahoo.com/deep-thoughts-sad-clown-000000256.html

So how do you know the knowledge exists if you don’t know that you know it?  It was almost too much for my brain to handle.  But the more I read, the more it started to make sense to me.  Michael Polanyi says this about the modern, objective view of science:

           The declared aim of modern science is to establish a strictly detached, objective
knowledge. Any falling short of this ideal is accepted only as a temporary imperfection,
which we must aim at eliminating. But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable
part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge
would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would
turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies. (1)

It was this passage that allowed me to start understanding what Polanyi was getting at.  I’ve had this experience with trying to teach math to my two children.  Early on in their learning I discovered that I was possibly the worst math teacher ever.  It wasn’t because I struggle with math, in fact I’ve always done well in the subject.  The problem was that understanding math and teaching math to someone else are two very different things.

As a child, I often found different ways to solve math problems than how it had been taught to me.  Somehow in my mind, I had figured out a method in which I could understand and solve the problems.  The issue, then, with teaching this to someone else, is that I don’t fully understand my own method.  I had never stopped to try to put that knowledge into words- and when it came to the point where I needed to access that knowledge in a way that could be explained, I found that I couldn’t.  I know how to solve the math problems, but I don’t know how I know it!  When I thought about this personal example of tacit knowledge, it suddenly made perfect sense to me.  Polanyi stresses the importance of society recognizing this tacit knowledge, and not neglecting it in the discussion of knowledge in general.

It makes me smile when I think of how the understanding of tacit knowledge deeply involves tacit knowledge.

References:

1) Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), pg. 20

Image: http://www.hetemeel.com